The making of

Serving the food is at least as important as the taste itself. Which is why we turned to a professional when launching our blog. We asked Ákos Polgárdi to package our written, filmed and photographed experiences. We had worked together on several projects in the past and once again he gave us no cause for disappointment: he found just the extra flavor we were looking for.

We talked to Ákos during our image shoot for WTF.

- What was the first thing that came to your mind when I told you about WhatTheFood?

- The first idea was a cursive, handwritten logotype. I wanted to make it clear that the whole project is about carefully produced content. It’s not easy to professionally manage a blog like this: record and cut material on a weekly basis, choose a soundtrack, do post-production etc. And then there’s the photography, uploading text, images and video to the site, sharing it on social media and so on. And we haven’t even started talking about the content.

- You mentioned the content: how does one wrap up written content in a nice way?

- Take the New York Times food blog: this is a very straightforward site where strong headings are followed by large amounts of text, all of it very factual and authoritative. But in our case we had to remain accessible, spacious, clear, and elegant.

- What’s the idea behind the WhatTheFood identity?

- I wanted to draw a friendly, roundish logotype and chose a very clean, humanist sans-serif font for the subtitle. The primary color (orange) was more or less obvious given the Dutch theme, but I tried to streer clear of over-used shades. A simplified mark was also needed for Facebook and, after considering several iterations, we went with a customized W taken from the primary logo.

- Luckily a new trend is starting to emerge where more and more places begin to realize the importance of a unified visual identity: after all, customers will first identify the restaurant with its logo and other branded items. A newly opened restaurant or street food joint will do its best to attract followers on social media, advertise events on Facebook etc., and it helps a lot if all this communication is unified by a consistent visual identity. The same goes for blogs as well.